How do you choose to purchase your vitamins and other supplements? Does convenience and price dictate what vitamin brands end up on your countertop? A recent report released by ConsumerLab.com contains some alarming news about the safety and accuracy of multivitamins available for purchase at your local nutrition / grocery stores. What they found is that more than 30 percent of the multivitamins tested contained too much or too little of certain ingredients as listed on the label and/or were contaminated with lead. Too much folic acid increases the risk of prostate cancer in men, too much vitamin A can cause nausea, blurred vision and liver problems, and, high levels of zinc can lead to anemia and immune deficiencies. All of these problems and many more including lead contamination were found in ConsumerLab.com's testing. In fact, a particular vitamin water product tested at 15 times its stated level of folic acid - not necessarily good for those concerned about their prostate health.

There are a number of benefits to buying organic including the absence of harmful herbicides and pesticides. Exposure to these chemicals are not only harmful, they can be deadly. According to a new report in the International Journal of Cancer, a study on 20,000 workers exposed to the crop herbicide imazethapyr found 3,000 or 15 percent of the workers later developed cancers. It's hard to say exactly how harmful these chemicals are to those of us who eat produce grown in fields where herbicides and pesticides are used, but based on these findings, we'd much rather be safe than be sorry. How about you?

The primary purpose of hospitals is to provide a safe environment where the sick and injured go to get well. However, medical errors in hospitals account for a staggering number of preventable deaths and the numbers don't seem to be improving. According to the sixth annual patient safety study conducted by HealthGrades, a healthcare assessment organization, preventable medical errors cost Medicare over $6.9 billion and caused more than 92,000 in-hospital deaths among Medicare beneficiaries between 2005 and 2007. Out of the approximately 38 million Medicare hospital admissions, more than 913,000 medical mistakes occurred. What's worse is of those mistakes, one in ten resulted in death. The good news, if there is any, is that Medicare patients had a 43 percent less likelihood of experiencing a medical error at award winning hospitals. Thus, it's pays to research your local hospitals before you become sick or injured. Visit http://www.healthgrades.com to research hospitals.

Experts used to believe that mental decline was something exclusive to the elderly and aging. New research now shows certain brain function begins to deteriorate much sooner - in the late 20s and 30s. Those brain functions susceptible to early deterioration included mental speed, problem solving and abstract reasoning. However, things such as vocabulary and general knowledge improved with age due to the accumulation of knowledge that occurs over the years. The new findings allow researchers to better study cognitive changes as we age and help to potentially discover ways to slow the deterioration as well as better predict the onset of dementias including Alzheimer's Disease.